This past summer, OFRE pitched an idea at a great Edmonton initiative put together by Next Gen called MEAET that strives to put micro-funding in the hands of people doing good for the city and community. Everyone who attends the event contributes a fee, and then after all the ideas are pitched, everyone enjoys a meal together and casts their vote for they idea they feel should receive the funding at the end of the night. We pitched an idea for funding to go towards the development of a pedal-powered apple crusher. Here is our MEAET 0.5 proposal from MEAET 0.5. One of the conditions of winning is that you will come back to the next MEAET in 11 weeks time to present what you have accomplished so far with your micro-grant funding.
Mike Johnson, the team lead for the project, put together a great progress report that captures the people involved, the ideas, the design questions we tackled in building a pedal powered crusher that can work for a variety of people who differ in age, height and body weight. Here is our OFRE MEAET Presentation given at MEAET 1.0.
With such a nice orchard, we got to thinking of other ways we can work with this grower and suggested doing a group pruning event to give his trees a needed trim and enable other fruit growers to learn techniques for pruning their own fruit trees. They were quite excited about the idea, so we are going to work on this and try to plan an event in the off season. It’s best to prune fruit trees after the harvest and before spring. Stay tuned!
